I think one of the fallouts of visiting any foreign country for an extended amount of time is having a sudden and intense interest in the celebrities of the said country.

Anyway, as such, my return from Taiwan has been marked with an extended interest in Jay Chou. What follows is the obvious: download his music, watch his music videos, pour over lyrics desperately trying to decode what the hell he’s saying (seriously, can this guy mumble any more? I didn’t think so), and finally watch his movies. So, I watched Secret, which he directed, which I thought was pretty damn good for a first effort. It was cute, I think.

(Now it gets ugly.) Last week, I followed up my Jay Chou movie viewing plans by watching Curse of the Golden Flower — holy crap. Okay, I remember when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out I thought it was an overrated movie that people were afraid to say was bad. Afterall, maybe they didn’t like it because they didn’t “get” it or because it’s a translation/foreign film/aren’t artsy films always a little weird? — e.g. it’s easier to give the movie the benefit of the doubt than to seem like an uncultured bigot, right? Yeah, so, Curse of the Golden Flower is so much worse.

Soooo much worse. I can’t believe how bad it was. I want to assume that people said they liked it for the reasons I stated above for Crouching Tiger, but honestly, you’d have to be a little stupid not to see how bad it was. It was just one plot turn after another that led up to bullshit. The most gruesome thing about it (other than the tens of thousands of dead corpses in the movie, of course) was seeing how much money had clearly gone into this terrible film. What a waste of stuff. Clearly an example of when liquidation value would’ve been higher than the “asset” they produced.

I don’t really have a point I’m trying to reach here. I just thought it needed to be said how bad this movie was.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 4:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Tags: Movies